We support women writers living and working in the East of England * Winner of Outstanding Contribution to The Arts Award 2018; Shortlisted for the Women In Publishing New Venture Award 2015 & 2016, for Saboteur Best One-Off Event 2015 and Best Anthology 2014 *

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Sunday, 28 January 2018

Working Class Writer

This piece by Bel Greenwood, co-organiser of Words And Women, first appeared on the Writers Centre Norwich website. It was written in response to a recent BBC Radio 4 programme that saw novelist Kit de Waal reflect on her own life and writing career, and the barriers faced by working-class writers today.

'I can
remember really looking forward to reading Maggie Ferguson’s biography of
Michael Morpurgo. I wasn’t even going to wait for the paperback version to come
out. I had read his stories to my own child and watched him passionately defend
the human rights of Palestinian children. I admired him, but I felt a familiar
disappointment when yet, again, Michael Morpurgo was revealed to be a former head
boy of a Canterbury public school who lead the late Queen Mother around the
grounds, ex-Sandhurst, and related by marriage to Allen Lane, head of Penguin
Books.I can remember thinking, how
typical. Of course, Michael Morpurgo has talent, lots of people have that, but
not everyone has such a route map. Frankly, if you are a working class writer you
really don’t have much of a map at all.

I am very
conscious of the need to avoid being ‘chippy.’ As if holding any resentment
about inequality is a character flaw and my perception of the publishing
industry as elitist, and poorly representative of where I come from isn’t valid.
But it is now being acknowledged by the publishing industry itself that working
class writers and stories are missing and some in the industry want to remove
the barriers to writers from my kind of background. Hence BBC Radio 4’s
documentary, ‘Where are all the Working Class Writers?’ A passionate, personal
take by Kit de Waal, who published her first book at the age of 55.

Is it so
different for someone like me and someone like Michael Morpurgo?Plenty of middle class people refuse to
accept that there is any difference. But of course, there is. It isn’t only financial
hardship, lack of time or a writing shed that gets in the way. It’s confidence,
self-belief, having a face that fits, a happy sense of entitlement, adopting a
way of speaking that is taken more seriously. Learning the alien skill of a
networking session, finding a sense of belonging without any idea of the codes
that tie people together.

I was born
into a large family at the back of the old Arsenal Football Stadium in London. When
I was five my father ran away. I don’t think he managed a single maintenance
payment and my mother was left pregnant with her fifth child, on benefits in
the late 1960s. It was tough, and we were very poor. I can remember us all
sitting round making pyjama trouser strings in the front room and was often
kept off school to help with the washing. My mother remarried a milkman with itchy feet and
we moved 14 times in 12 years. I went to 8 schools, in secondhand shoes and on free
school meals, we were easy fodder for bullies. Years later, a wealthy friend,
son of lawyers, asked me why life was always a battle. No one where I grew up
would think to ask that question.

Having been
at comprehensives and a secondary modern, I ended up at a grammar school where
the headmistress asked me if my father drank, after all he is working class, he
is also teetotal except at Christmas. I was one of two working class pupils in
the sixth form and became a Communist and played truant in response.

In those
years, I can remember visiting the home of an artist whose work resembled
Modigliani. I pointed this out, and she responded, ‘Oh, you know who Modigliani
is?’ She couldn’t believe that someone like me would know about an
Italian-Jewish 19th century artist who lived in France. I couldn’t
help thinking, why shouldn’t I know as much as anyone else. Thank Goodness for
public libraries, my gateway into a bigger world where art could belong to
anyone.

Why am I
writing this? Because the perceptions and expectations of others feed the
perception and expectations of ourselves. My mother’s ambition was for me to
work in Woolworths. It took me years to get to university, the first generation
in my family to do so. Even then I did it as a single parent in a city of
strangers, excited but unsure how to belong, and frankly, without Arts and
Humanities Research Board funding of my MA, it simply wouldn’t have happened. I am grateful for that support and aware of what
a rare chance I have been given. But it’s still hard not to feel like an
imposter. In my early adult life, I spent years listening to intellectual bores
who I was convinced must be more right than me because of their class.
Thankfully, I have outgrown that – but the shuttle diplomacy between my working
class origins, and the middle class world of publishing continues in an
atmosphere of self-doubt and hope.Now
more than ever we need to tell the right stories and I believe we need a range
of voices to do the telling, anything less will only ever give us a dangerously
partial view.'